iPad

iOS

Jailbreak

Cydia

Shortcuts, shortcuts, and more shortcuts; they make iOS so pleasing to use. When do we draw the line? A quick answer – we don’t, because jailbreaking means unlimited possibilities.

If you find it extremely difficult to look on your home screen to find the application you want to launch, or to search SpotLight for the application you want to launch, or to launch Siri and tell her to open an application after installing a third party Siri addon to give her that functionality, then a new free jailbreak tweak dubbed Appswitch by iOS developer Ron Melkhior might help you out some.

Appswitch makes it so you can add up to four application shortcuts to your multitasking App Switcher. These four applications are added through a preferences pane inside of your Settings application and they will always be present in the multitasking App Switcher no matter what – even when you have one of the applications running. There are four cells for choosing each application and then you tap on the “Apply Changes” button to perform a respring and save your changes:

While the tweak could undoubtedly come in handy for certain things, it’s not without its noticeable visual flaws. Some of the major flaws include how the applications don't have any labels and the way the icons are shaped oddly (more rectangular) in comparison to Apple’s true icon size (which are perfect squares):

Functionally, the tweak works just fine. All of the applications launch rapidly as you would expect them to. If you have any applications hidden with Springtomize or some other kind of application-hiding service, these shortcuts will still show those applications in the App Switcher. This means if you want to hide applications from your home screen, Appswitch is a good way to keep them in reach.

Appswitch is a SwitcherLoader add-on and will therefore install SwitcherLoader as a dependency if you don’t already have it installed. Appswitch also requires iOS 5 to be installed. If you want to add application shortcuts to the App Switcher, then check out Appswitch. If you hate adding clutter to places like the App Switcher, then Appswitch will not impress you. It does not yet work with the iPad – only the iPhone and iPod touch.